What is this conspiracy? I haven’t quite defined it to my own satisfaction. A friend of mine, Martins, a radio anchor, once asked me during one of his shows “Tope, Nigeria is an unbuilt country. Yet we say there is no employment. Who will build the country”. Now, building a country does not involve only money. Indeed there is a lot that is done for free when building a country. We must tame our entrepreneurship rhetoric so it doesn’t get all our youths thinking of how to make money from every transaction. They are money-hungry, simply because they have been deprived for too long. And usually such deprivation leads to untrammelled greed and destruction. Yet there are opportunities for the youth to be part of the building of Nigeria. Opportunities abound.
I had once pushed for the launching of a program titled “Cleanest, Safest and Most-Organized Country in Africa”, as a way of anchoring the energy of our youth, and creating a new spending class, especially by providing provisional employment for secondary school leavers in the light security and environmental sectors. These youths can be used to make Nigeria clean, safe and organised. The goal is to begin to work towards that reality. It is a journey not a destination. Millions of lives can be transformed this way. Food poverty can be eradicated. And I believe this category of people are such that will patronize local goods. What is more? This initiative will begin to get our youths to be financially included and responsible. This is how it is done in every reasonable country. In Europe and USA and everywhere else we like to fly to and admire, while ruing our own fates, they now get jobs in secondary industries. People push out their children from 16 to go get a job. Here, we will need government intervention for now, because the jobs we have here are still very elementary, fundamental, and often not profitable to private sector involvement. We are talking of things like street sweeping, planting and protection of grass and flowers, beautifying the streets, securing our streets, organizing our streets, towns and villages, ensuring people keep to rules etc. These are things that if we get them right will pay for the effort by way of attracting tourists and Diasporan Nigerians to come and spend here.
But I then had a better idea. We need to scale up. We have been hearing of how our graduates leave university with no skills. Foreign companies come here and complain that they can’t find anyone to employ hence they have to bring their own employees. We also hear about how government is spending too little on education. As we speak ASUU is on strike for another pay raise. Can we not solve the problem by getting students in universities involved already in solving society’s problems while they learn? Can we not assess them on the practical problems they solve? Can our university, polytechnic and college students not get involved in group projects directed at these problems? Can we not pay them for their efforts? If a student gets anything like N40,000 per semester for getting involved in problem-solving projects would that not encourage them to learn? Who says the professors who supervise these experimental solutions cannot get an extra N500,000 every semester? And the projects are there, staring us in the face. Who says private sector companies cannot mentor these students and take them on as interns for the duration of the projects they are doing? Will this not open up Nigeria big time? Will this not give our students experience that they can write up on their CVs even while at school? Will this not crash the cost of contracting in Nigeria?
Imagine if students of civil engineering in polys and universities begin to get involved in building small street roads? Imagine if students of urban and regional planning actually helped in planning and opening up our villages, small towns and inner cities? Imagine if students of geography and regional planning actually helped find solutions to our many erosions and helped in planting trees and grass where we are suffering from decertification? Imagine if students of electrical engineering were the ones building and operating mini hydro turbines, solar, windmills, biomass and other clever ideas that will light up Nigeria from the ground up? Will that not be better than these mass importation of power plants that we cannot maintain? Will that not begin to short circuit our inefficient transmission system? Imagine if students of history were helping to collate the histories of all our small settlements and students in computer science helped to create the websites and upload our dying languages on the internet? Who says we cannot build a Google full of Nigerian and African content? The amount of data entry required for the issues besetting Nigeria is endless! No one should think these ideas will take away jobs from those looking for it with their certificates presently. These ideas can only open the space. For we can employ the same long-suffering graduates to supervise these projects. These ideas aren’t too far-fetched. I realized there is an intricate link between society, companies, public sector and universities everywhere else in the developed world. Stanford University built Silicon Valley, for starters. And Stanfordites still troop there even while in school. I see Nigerian higher institutions with no roads, no water, no light… dilapidated infrastructure, abandoned projects and I wonder why they cannot help themselves. What is the essence of a degree if you cannot solve problems. Ok, give the students incentives. Let them experiment. Make them feel appreciated. They will create a new Nigeria.
Think about any department in the university. They can immediately begin to impact on society. For departments where we struggle to find a direct link – say Philosophy – we can make the student choose where they will love to embed so long as they want to be useful. The dispersion of these schools all over Nigeria also means we can begin to specially diversify and open up this country which had been hemmed in since our leaders focused only on state capitals. This will be a remarkable project and I am sure our youths will appreciate it. I once told this to a top banker friend of mine and he said Nigerians don’t want to work. I really don’t think so. At least we must give opportunities to those who are willing to be useful. Starting from our campuses will further add integrity to such an idea because not only does there reside a bit more decorum among our professors, ghost students are lesser than ghost workers. And I believe monitoring will be easier at that level.
So this is the biggest conspiracy against Nigerian youths. It is the fact that there is much to be built in Nigeria, they have the energy, passion, exposure, imagination, connectedness, innocence, clear-mindedness, agility to build up the country, but are decidedly being obstructed, confused, deprived, impoverished, seduced with ephemeral nonsense, violated, contaminated, corrupted, used and abused, vilified and deliberately sent on wild goose chases to pursue money where it doesn’t exist while our pretend leaders work actively in solidifying the modern slavery era that Nigeria has become. That is why our leaders don’t care if any number of Nigerian boys are sold as slaves in Libya, beaten up mercilessly by police in Angola, deported like sardines from Gabon, languish by the thousands in Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai jails, seek for asylum like wild beasts and wretched of the earths all over Europe. None of them gives a toss.
Youth. Yes you. Wake up!
Concluded
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